Gotta say, haven't had someone comment on my posts as thoroughly as you do now in a long time, Crow. Thank you for that.
And while I do understand your desire, I do retain my right to at least make one hell of an attempt to break free from my chessochism... or masochessm... or Schacholm Syndrome. It's all relative fun and games until you're faced with a newfound appreciation for your own hypochondria and you feel like you're gonna end up like Steinitz but without actually having become the champion or anything remotely near it. 
For example, risk/reward estimation is helpful in some political and economical disciplines (as well as some games like poker), and visualisation and problem-solving seem to be useful skills to have in applied logic and mathematics (e. g. programming). Still, those are just my vague guesses, and I don't know exactly how it all carries over.
I'm asking this because I'm looking for a profession as a part of which I can use skills I've attained by playing chess for the past 12 years... whatever those skills actually are. I'm a professional musician, but aside from the frighteningly scarce practical opportunities in that field this year, I also don't find chess skills to be really useful in anything music-related... and I really need to find a job and stop playing chess, both for my own health. That's why I need to do something that I can integrate my chess skills in, otherwise I'll feel that I've wasted over a decade on something I might be only barely close to being any sort of an above-intermediate player at (in the terms of chess titles), without gaining any income or general life satisfaction from it.